Hailing from Cyanogen's cofounder, Kora is a next-gen alternative to Windows and macOS for power users running local AI models. Kirt McMaster knows that his new operating system--Kora--won't be for everyone, and he's fine with that. Kora, announced on Tuesday, is designed as a desktop alternative to Windows or macOS for "the AI native, not mass market," he says. McMaster, the company's CEO and cofounder--who also cofounded Boost Mobile--likens his strategy to how Steve Jobs targeted creators when overhauling desktop publishing with the Mac . This "next-generation" desktop OS can integrate context from user interactions across multiple AI tools.

Ring's Indoor Drone Camera Is Back--and Now Powered by AI This $250 Drone Cam flies around your home to monitor threats. No one's home tonight, but the sensor on your home office window upstairs alerts your phone: "Motion detected." Instead of shrugging it off, you ask Alexa to send your Ring Drone Cam to check it out. The tiny, 165-gram drone lifts out of its charging dock, buzzing loudly, and autonomously flies upstairs, giving you a first-person view on your phone's screen as it scans the room. Since it's dark in the house, the Drone's spotlights kick in, making it look like someone's physically in the home and moving around--a potential deterrent to would-be thieves.

Grindr will limit membership numbers to "preserve exclusivity." In a reddit AMA on Friday, in between jokes about gay bears and JD Vance's potential username being CushionCasanova, Grindr CEO George Arison answered a question about the economy. "Inflation is terrible, and there's a massive affordability crisis in this country that our government has ignored since at least 2020," he wrote in the r/wallstreetbets subreddit, where, following the release of the company's quarterly earnings report, he took questions from users. It was a startling admission from the man whose company is about to release a subscription offering intended to price out most Grindr users. On November 17, Edge, a "premium tier" with some AI-powered features costing $120 a month, will be available to members worldwide, according to the report.

The outspoken consumer rights advocate knows the incoming Democrat-heavy Congress has a lot to get done. But he hopes one of those things is letting you fix your own iPhone. I love my old iPhone 14, but I'm starting to face the facts: It's going to die. The battery is about to go; apps take longer to load than they used to. Some of it I can fix. I can go to the Genius Bar and swap the battery. Maybe I could even do it myself; that'd buy me some time. But eventually, Apple won't support this wildly expensive device at all, and there's not much I can do about it. Apple did start offering self-repair services a few years ago, but it involves renting nearly 80 pounds of equipment and requires you to use official parts. When all is said and done, it doesn't save you that much money versus just going to the Apple Store . But if I buy a screen or a camera component from a third party, there's a chance my iPhone is gonna lock me out of certain features because it doesn't recognize it. This problem goes far beyond iPhones. Manufacturers have put similar locks on all kinds of gadgets, from video game consoles to cars to smart home devices, making them hard to modify and even harder to restore after some firmware update renders a certain feature unusable.

The AI Safety Debate Has Lost the Plot. The risk of nuclear catastrophe is real, as is the fallout of the China-US domination game (hi there, spies). But no need to panic about Skynet. In early fall, I felt my anxiety rising from its usual baseline. Was it September's back-to-school energy? Nope, I realized with annoyance: It was AI--again. Only this time, instead of its purveyors warning of massive job displacement, they were foretelling mass extinction. Who needs jobs when we're all dead? Curiosity soon replaced my knee-jerk irritation. The summer of 2026 was a clear turning point in the AI narrative. Less than four years after ChatGPT launched, OpenAI software broke out of a supposedly safe test environment and hacked into a major open-source platform, Hugging Face . These bits of software-- AI agents --were assigned human attributes: They had "gone rogue," displayed "bad behavior," "cheated."

DeepMind researchers were able to formally verify that the widely used encryption protocol works as intended. Do the same for "all the software of the world." Google DeepMind researchers used agentic AI to mathematically prove, or "formally verify," a number of the Signal protocol's key cryptographic guarantees--a landmark development for the widely used cryptography and AI itself. Conducted as a sort of proof-of-concept project in just four weeks, the work is significant in two ways. It serves as further independent validation of the cryptography that protects massive quantities of the world's communications on platforms like the Signal app, Google Messages, and WhatsApp.

Jensen Huang's Troubles Leave the AI Industry Reeling With a big checkbook and sought-after chips, Nvidia's CEO had his thumb on the world of AI. An extramarital affair with a suspected Chinese spy may put all of that at risk. No executive has pulled the strings in the artificial intelligence era quite like Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang . He parlayed the boom into incredible wealth, became a close confidant of President Donald Trump, and emerged as a prominent voice in US-China relations. That now all stands in the balance.

Waymo Said It Fixed Its School Bus Problem. The US Government Says It Didn't Work Last year, Waymo recalled its software after several of its autonomous cars drove around stopped buses. Now the feds want to know more. The US government is examining whether Waymo's recall of software involved with a series of school bus passing incidents last fall actually fixed the safety issue. The formal investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will determine whether the company's supposed software fix succeeded in preventing its robotaxis from improperly passing stopped school buses with red lights on and their stop arms extended--indicators that the buses were picking up and dropping off students.

As the publishing industry wrestles with paranoia over the provenance of manuscripts, writers are caught in an impossible bind. Andrea Bartz is a prolific novelist with an impressive résumé . Since 2019, she has published five thrillers, become a New York Times bestselling author, had her work optioned by the likes of Netflix and Hulu, and picked up an endorsement from Reese Witherspoon's influential book club. But while Bartz and many other writers were on guard against this plunder of their work, another AI threat was brewing. What happens when authors are accused of relying on artificial intelligence themselves?

The AI detector will now check your incoming emails for machine-generated text. AI-generated content is everywhere now: From restaurant menus and student essays to full-length movies and social media posts, AI is churning out huge amounts of text, images, audio, and video. Just how many of your friends, family members, clients, and colleagues are using AI to compose their emails? Is that store newsletter you just signed up for written by a real person or a bot? It's not always easy to tell.